Welcome!

Kiali

Difficulty:Advanced

Estimated Time:15 minutes

At some point when you are developing your microservice architecture, you will need to visualize what is happening in your service mesh. You will have questions like “Which service is connected to which other service?” and “How much traffic goes to each microservice?” But because of the loosely tied nature of microservice architectures , these questions can be difficult to answer.

Those are the kinds of question that Kiali has the ability to answer, by giving you a big picture of the mesh, and showing the whole flow of your requests and data.

Kiali builds upon the same concepts as Istio, and you can check the glossary for a refresher.

Service Graph

After you login, you should see the Service Graph page on the Graph menu:

Note that you might need to select the tutorial namespace.

It shows a graph with all the microservices, connected by the requests going through then. On this page, you can see how the services interact with each other.

Applications

Note that you might need to select the tutorial namespace.

Click the Applications link in the left navigation. On this page you can view a listing of all the services that are running in the cluster, and additional information about them, such as health status.

Click on the "customer" application to see its details:

By hovering the icon on the Health section, you can see the health of a service (a service is considered healthy) when it’s online and responding to requests without errors:

By clicking on Outbound Metrics or Inbound Metrics, you can also see the metrics for an application, like so:

Workloads

Click the Workloads link in the left navigation. On this page you can view a listing of all the workloads are present on your applications.

Click on the customer workload. Here you can see details for the workload, such as the pods and services that are included in it:

By clicking Outbound Metrics and Inbound Metrics, you can check the metrics for the workload. The metrics are the same as the Application ones.

Services

Click on the Services link in the left navigation. Here, you can see the listing of all services.

Click on the customer service. You can, on this page, see the details of the service, such as metrics, traces, workloads, virtual services, destination rules and so on:

Distributed Tracing

Click on the Distributed Tracing link in the left navigation. The distributed tracing, provided by Jaeger, will open in a new page.

NOTE: The tracing page opens in a new browser window/tab, so if it doesn’t open, please check if your browser didn’t block it from opening.

Help

Katacoda offerings an Interactive Learning Environment for Developers. This course uses a command line and a pre-configured sandboxed environment for you to use. Below are useful commands when working with the environment.

cd <directory>

Change directory

ls

List directory

echo 'contents' > <file>

Write contents to a file

cat <file>

Output contents of file

Vim

In the case of certain exercises you will be required to edit files or text. The best approach is with Vim. Vim has two different modes, one for entering commands (Command Mode) and the other for entering text (Insert Mode). You need to switch between these two modes based on what you want to do. The basic commands are: